Shaping the Land

BY JAKOB RYCE

When you migrated to the south, beating your mouth in pitches, you claimed your wealth would bring prosperity for all. When you developed a taste for acquisitions, possessions, revisions, and cut the strings that tethered you to the fruitless land, the scorched land of willow and bark; far from the docks lined with mosquito fossils and the ceaseless choir of fowls. When you renounced the scrub and forest, pine and possum. When you stood up tall against the redwood that loomed over the entire wildwood bastille, said no more, and rallied strangers to bring axes and saws, their children to light spot-fires in the tall grass and burn anything that was not dead. When you rose early to raise steel towers against the flattened granite sky and showed them how to wield combustion. When you grew bored of the mountain’s secrets and cracks appeared in your eyes, you stirred up the muddy waters of want and of what was lost. When you chased the morning down with amber and strolled steaming into the yellow fields, striking down whomever crossed your path. When you mistook the dark women for wives and drove their children away; for all their talk of the seven mothers and magnetic horses and living things that should never touch the skin. When your neighbors spoke of consequences you still boiled with visions of land – land rich with blood, ancestors unbeknownst to you; oppressed in dreams, oppressed in visions, oppressed in earth; appearing in your dreams as rapt pale specters, drinking in rivers of sweat. When you held the branch of black angel flowers to your heart in dreams and held out your thick scoured hands, your family unable to look at you. Only after you churned the red earth for all its worth, for all their worth. Only after announcing that all ancient things be shaped into iron, after every animal had slunk away, and the sons and daughters of the past were rekindled with their shadowed families. Only then did you sit on your porch breathing in fire, master of your domain, watching the blackbirds plough and sweat for crops reserved for you alone – satisfaction on your lips, a hubris glint in your eyes. But even then, the land would remain unchanged, unyielding, and would always be as it had been, long before you and long after you.

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Jakob Ryce is a freelance writer, teacher and poet from Melbourne, Australia. He has a B.A. in English Lit, and his work has been published in On The Premises, Drunk Monkeys, and the Wyndham Writing Awards. Jakob’s first chapbook of poetry is due to be published this year.

Tributaries: "Hermit Crab Struggles to Move House"

BY SARAH FAWN MONTGOMERY

I know the weight of a home

too small, spiraling

the self to fit in a darkness

that requires shrinking

in order to be held

close by the walls

pale pink, luminescent,

the smell of salt and brine

a terrible comfort,

sound of the sea

swelling around desire

to disappear, exposed

and soft as you leave

a home that never

fit, the filth of family

wet and stinking

at your scuttling feet

dragging tender vulnerabilities

across the hot sand,

seagulls circling overhead

to cry danger at your escape

the search to claim

a space in another discarded

shell, home a construct

you must accept

if you hope to survive

the tide or the muck

of rotting kelp,

the children’s urge

to crush you underfoot,

father skipping you

like a stone to ease

his bored disappointment,

and how you shine,

comma of tail tethering

you back as you crawl feverish,

afraid, toward something new.

---

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University. You can follow her on Twitter at @SF_Montgomery

TRIBUTARIES: "Must Have Been a Bridge"

BY: PAUL CUNNINGHAM

society’s weight

floats

on river’s

surface, to such an exten t

I go blank

in the mirror my bones appear closer

closelysyllabled

than most ontological assumptions of

l i f e or m a t t e r

as I imagine every way a body’s blood

could possibly spiral, vortex

beneath my skin

mirror you stop me, the river

sometimes my head

rages,

infinite your touch, a memory above

I feel emptied of unnecessary weight

a river raging, reassembling

I traverse the current, con-

fluent waters, I cannot speak,

drifting, I

catch only a glimpse:

the sharp of a beaver’s

orange hammer-tooth

the noisy orange-red gnaw

of sunlight’s impact

how it alters landscape

surface and depth

how a mirror always

brings us back

into focus

---

Paul Cunningham is the author of the The House of the Tree of Sores (Schism2 Press, 2020), The Inmost (Carrion Bloom Books, 2020), and translator of Helena Österlund’s Words (OOMPH! Press, 2019). He is a managing editor of Action Books and a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia. @p_cunning

Tributaries: "I Have a Second Stomach"

By Kate Finegan

for peaches

     eaten     ripe

          over kitchen sinks in summer

berries   plucked     from Northwoods balds

     arsenic

          in     apple seeds

skin cells     I breathe from

     your pillow       at night

spiders that slide

          down my     tongue      

               in sleep

     crowns

from teeth     ground to dust

          particulate matter          from walking

 city streets

          all the times I bit my

     tongue to

blood

     all the times I have told you     I’m awful

and all the times you     have told me

     I’m not            and all the times

          this earth’s

told me it’s awful and     all the ways

it has shown me

it’s not

---

Kate Finegan has a short story chapbook forthcoming with Penrose Press in November 2018. Her work has won contests with Thresholds, Phoebe Journal, Midwestern Gothic, and The Fiddlehead; been runner-up for The Puritan's Thomas Morton Memorial Prize; and been shortlisted for the Cambridge Short Story Prize.

Tributaries: "Postgrad"

By Monic Ductan

My apartment complex, Hillside Manor, a generous name for the little row of six apartments in a blonde brick building, sat near the town square. Though Hillside was far from the classiest neighborhood, the rent was cheap, which was a gift to someone like me, a twenty-two-year-old with student loan debt. Plus, I lived less than a mile from work, and I figured that when my old Toyota finally died I’d ride a bike or walk to work.

The apartment building was flanked on two sides by a crumbling, wooden, privacy fence. A vacant apartment sat to my right, but a family, the McClures, lived on my left. The McClures were friendly and waved whenever I saw them, though they sometimes annoyed me, as they had a habit of being boisterous. Some nights I’d hear them banging against our shared wall or yelling at each other. The McClure man, who smoked out on their porch, had a penchant for going shirtless, his saggy white skin drooping around his waist. Once I saw him at the gas station in town, both shirtless and shoeless. When the cashier told him not to come back unless fully clothed, McClure grumbled, “Shit, man, I ain’t never wore a damn shirt in the summertime.”

In the country, the insects are noisy at night. They make a mechanical sound. I loved to hear that sound as I sat out on the porch at night and read a book or flipped through a magazine. But I’d quickly quit the habit, as I grew tired of McClure’s cigarette smoke drifting over the railing and into my nostrils. Worse still, one night I went out there and looked next door to see the McClure woman in her husband’s lap on their porch, her t-shirt riding up so high I could see the crack of her ass and the tattoo above it.

My apartment had a back porch, too, but the view was desolate—a tiny square block of pavement that housed the two dumpsters. Scraggly stray cats usually roamed back there, and I once thought I saw a possum slinking away toward Patty’s Café.

On the evening of a supermoon, I drove home feeling tired and stuck in a going nowhere job. Country twanging my radio. My eyes misty with tears. I saw one of the McClure kids, a barefooted girl whose knees were scabbed and dirty, playing in the grass in front of the apartments. A neighbor had dumped a sofa in the grassy acre we all shared as a front yard. The McClure girl climbed onto the broken armrest of the sofa, which leaked foam stuffing onto the grass.

When I got out of the car, I turned. The yellow moon hung behind the McClure girl like a painting. Her hair shot out in front of it, pointing in all directions. Sun rays.

---

Monic Ductan's work has appeared in Shenandoah, Water~Stone Review, Big Muddy, So to Speak, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She's an assistant professor at Tennessee Technological University, where she teaches fiction writing and literature.

Tributaries: “Peony”

By Sally Nacker

for B.W.

You bring home a peony bush

to plant with your dog’s ashes.

Too late for medicine, or hope,

but not for beauty. Each June,

an effusion of vivid blossoms

will open, blessing air. And all month,

you will bless your beloved friend

in open prayer. July will wander

cruelly in, like death again, each year.

New life will follow, each next spring,

as fresh buds loosen and declare.

Sally Nacker has published poems in Mezzzo Cammin: An Online Journal of Formalist Poetry by Women, and Grey Sparrow Journal. Other poems are forthcoming in The Orchards, and The Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine. Her first book, Vireo, was published by Kelsay Books in 2015. She lives in New England with her husband, and their two cats.